Adventure games is another one of those vague genres. What kind of adventure are you most into? The classic point-and-clicks or the newer action-adventures? Also, I am curious about which one of these games you're interested in?
BONUS ADVENTURE GAMES ANNOUNCED:
- Life is Strange: Before the Storm

Telltale´s "adventure" games are a true mockery to the point n click adventure genre, and the revival the franchise got a good bunch of years back which telltale was part of with games like wallace gromit and the sam and max seasons.
However Telltale is the main reason the genre pretty much died almsot out again and are left to dull/low quality developers like Pendulo/Daedelic/Microids again, all of them are either releasing buggy games or nowhere near the magic of classics like Day of Tentacle/Fandango.
Telltales games are visual novels which are casualised to the point as far as "adventure" input goes so the average gamer doesnt get stuck but can enjoy the story instead. However i would have been positive if i could say the stories were better than their tv/comic counterparts. Walking Dead is even more terribly written than the show itself, playign their newer franchises is like playing a poor mans story of a huge movie/comic franchise.
I dont see Telltale any different than EA with their sport franchises, Telltale is pretty much doing the same tactic, buying a big event/franchise and just basing a simple episodic story into them, most of the stories and episodes are around the 5/10 quality during a season anyway and makes you regret ever investing time into them.

Agree. Telltale´s "adventure" games are a true mockery to the point n click adventure genre, and the revival the franchise got a good bunch of years back which telltale was part of with games like wallace gromit and the sam and max seasons.
However Telltale is the main reason the genre pretty much died almsot out again and are left to dull/low quality developers like Pendulo/Daedelic/Microids again, all of them are either releasing buggy games or nowhere near the magic of classics like Day of Tentacle/Fandango.
Telltales games are visual novels which are casualised to the point as far as "adventure" input goes so the average gamer doesnt get stuck but can enjoy the story instead. However i would have been positive if i could say the stories were better than their tv/comic counterparts. Walking Dead is even more terribly written than the show itself, playign their newer franchises is like playing a poor mans story of a huge movie/comic franchise.
I dont see Telltale any different than EA with their sport franchises, Telltale is pretty much doing the same tactic, buying a big event/franchise and just basing a simple episodic story into them, most of the stories and episodes are around the 5/10 quality during a season anyway and makes you regret ever investing time into them.

I do have lots of gameplay videos but my channel focuses on nostalgia in that regard mainly. I have played through Morrowind, Skyrim, Apotheon, Transistor, Biosys, Obduction, Age of Wonders 1, Caesar 3, Stronghold HD, Anno 1404, Age of Empires 1/2, Stardew Valley, Fallout 2, Populous The Beginning, and I have one-off series called Nostalgiasm (old games you can buy) and Abandonware Adventures (old games you can't buy).

Shadow of War is not an adventure game, it's an action game. What makes an adventure is it doesn't really have "action" in that sense. The merging of genres is hurting ALL genres and PC gaming overall!

Yeah I do, that's why my RPG list I specifically say it's a mix of cRPGs, jRPGs, Western RPGs, and Action RPGs. If I was just going to include cRPGs, I would make a cRPG list. If I was going to make a point-and-click list I would do that. Though even then, at how much action does a cRPG become an Action RPG? Where's the line between the two? Must you have only a specific type of combat system for it to be a cRPG? Must it be dice-rolls only? Does it have to be visually isometric? That's a very restrictive way of working and games could stagnate. Mass Effect and Borderlands could be considered RPGs or at least Action games with RPG elements, but they are closer to Western RPGs not cRPGs. Plus, Mass Effect isn't as 'actioney' as more Action-Action games, so there are Action enthusiasts that say Mass Effect isn't an Action game. Where should it be put then? No one is telling you that Mass Effect and Borderlands are cRPGs. By your definition, it sounds like Morrowind isn't even an RPG.
For your question, you're asking how other than through genre merging we get shallow 'every genre in a game'? You can't, if the problem is 'every genre in a game' then you can't have that problem without genre merging. Maybe you meant something slightly different?
As for the indie market and not genre merging, well there are plenty of bad examples there too. Broken Age is a classic point-and-click but severely a casual and shallow experience. Armikrog is another terrible game but strictly a point-and-click. Homeworld Deserts of Kharak is strictly an RTS, but again very shallow and simplistic. Lethis is a classic city-builder but extremely underdeveloped and doesn't even closely live up to the depth of the original Impressions games. There's also an endless list of bad simulation games coming out of the indie scene too. Sticking to a genre or being indie doesn't make them good games.
Yes, there are good indie games and if it wasn't for the indie-market a lot of types of games would be gone, that's true for any media and industry. We wouldn't have anymore noir films without indie works. Though that's not a genre merging problem, that's a publisher wanting and needing to make money problem. Noir films simply wouldn't reliably make money at the box office and for a long time cRPGs wouldn't either. It's easy to say now after a decade plus of good cRPGs being rare that people have jumped at the chance for new ones, then to point at publishers and call them out for being blind and ignorant of what the market wants, but there was a time when the game industry was flooded with cRPGs and they stopped selling well. The classic point-and-click is coming back now and everyone jumps at a good one, but do you remember how many terrible *terrible* point-and-clicks there were in the 80s/90s? The deluge of bad games from bandwagoning developers, AAA published or indie, kills a genre more than anything. The modern military shooter dominated for most of the 2000s but you can see now even COD and Battlefield are moving away from it because it stopped selling as well and there are too many of them. Now everyone's going, 'Wow! Finally some WW1 and WW2 shooters!', but remember when WW2 shooters were everywhere and people got tired of them? Publishers stick to what is known to work and make money, when it stops making money they stop making that thing, and it takes the indie scene to revitalise it years later because the publishers were told very clearly by market forces that it doesn't sell anymore. We can even see the revitalisation of WW2 shooters in the indie scene with Battalion 1944 and Days of War emerging over the past couple years.
There are also lots of indie games that merge a lot of genres into a game as the indie scene is often a lot more experimental and are good. Crypt of the Necrodancer is a rhythm action dungeon-crawler, Offworld Trading Company is an economic management RTS, Stardew Valley is a farming management dungeon crawler dating sim, and Rocket League is football with cars. We wouldn't have any of those games without genre merging.
Overall it sounds like you're equating bad game design to genre merging, when I think it's just bad game design that you should take on a game-by-game basis.

Tell that to cRPG fans like me that are now told games like Mass Effect and Borderlands are RPG's! Tell point and click Adventure fans that Tomb Raider is an adventure game! Finally tell me how, other than genre merging, we get the shallow "every genre in a game" to try and reach everybody in most AAA games? If it wasn't for the indie market, genre merging would have destroyed cRPG gaming, point and click adventure gaming and simulation gaming!

I don't see how merging of genres is hurting PC gaming, it's just category semantics really. It's human nature to classify things but in reality there are no hard lines separating things and there never were. It's the same in biology, sure we can say mammal, reptile, etc, but nature is in reality a gradient (biggest example is that there is no clear definition or agreement on what a 'fish' is). Saying game genres merging hurts gaming overall is like saying film genres merging hurts the film industry, but you can have horror-comedies or a sci-fi neo-noirs and it's fine. I would argue that it would be impossible for anyone to come up with a definition of any genre that everyone will agree with. I've made these lists for years, and every single list has people providing conflicting definitions for the genre. This is more clearly seen in 'Simulation Games', as that really is a nebulous word. When it comes to 'Adventure', saying that adventure doesn't entail any action seems counter-intuitive.

I would prefer you make actual videos perhaps seperate or added to top 10 videos as extra to showcase the "bonuses" This is exacly the reason people and i watch your videos, So its not US that do the Research

I can't wait for what more thatgamecompany is going to come up with. I love Journey and Flow and I often come back to those titles. I'm also excited for Shenmue III. I grew up with the series and I contributed to the kickstarter so I really want to see where it's going to go.

Journey was so great, can't wait to see another title from them. I honestly want to check out all of these titles, I'm more of an fps kind of guy because that's where most of my friends are but I think I'm ready for a new adventure. lol

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